It’s a bright summer afternoon in 2009 and my six-year-old son and I have just flown to Ottawa for my brother’s wedding. He’s excited to be the ring bearer and looks amazing in his suit.

It’s a busy time for me right now with work, but we’ve fit it in beautifully. Fly in on Thursday, prep Friday, wedding Saturday and home Sunday morning so I have Sunday and Monday to finish a report for a client.

As soon as we arrive, we’re in a maelstrom of crazy family stuff. Lunch with my son, my brother and my father at Montana’s, meeting all the wedding party, picking up last minute things for the wedding and so much more.

My son is really excited that my mum and dad are right next door to us at the hotel. He adores them, and it takes a while to finally get him to sleep.

I’m in my early 20’s and I’m doing graduate studies in quantum physics at the University of Manitoba. It’s interesting and kind of fun, but it’s not really my passion.

What’s cool is that I get to run my experiments on a massive $10,000,000 particle accelerator.

What’s not cool is that a couple of times a year we have to take the whole thing apart for maintenance and cleaning, and because I’m pretty skinny, guess who gets to crawl around in all the weird crevices taking things apart and putting them back together?

Once the maintenance is done, we have to get it working properly again.

What this machine does is produce a beam of particles that shoots down a beam line (basically a big hollow tube that’s got all the air sucked out of it). Thing is, just like a flashlight, the beam widens as it moves, so you don’t get a lot at the end.

How allowing myself to be “weak” allowed me to be stronger than I had ever dreamed possible

It’s the summer of 2009, and my wife and I just decided to end our marriage. On top of that, when we married, we merged our consulting companies, so we also have to separate our business

We told our son and my stepsons (her sons) and our families, but not many others yet. It broke my heart to see my parents’ faces when we told them.

I’m heading down to Orlando for some meetings. I’m on the national board of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS), on track to be president in 2011, and every summer we have a 2-day in-person board meeting prior to the convention for our sister association in America, the National Speakers Association (NSA).

So many of my closest friends are in CAPS and our sister associations around the world, and I’ll be seeing most of them at the convention. I’m dreading it.

Bob can’t believe his boss just did that. So much focus on how important this was and so much work the last six months and so much hyping up, and in one minute it all went out the window.

Six months ago, Bob was so excited to be asked by Mr Jacobson, his boss, to lead a team to find ways to make the business more efficient. Jacobson had just been to a trade conference and heard about some amazing gains other companies -his competitors – had made by reinventing the way they did work.

They created huge cost savings and gains in revenue for his competitors, and that fired Jacobson up to do this in his company, so he came back, pulled in Bob and tasked him with the project of finding the biggest opportunities for innovation and gains in the company.

Now Bob still had to do everything that was already on his plate, and so did everyone else drafted into the team, but the project was highlighted over and over again in Jacobson’s messages from the President.